Fury

by Llewellin Jegels

  “So I guess Mrs. Abaid is feeling a bit lonely right now.”

  “I would imagine so,” Mel muttered, and I could tell from the tone of his voice that he had moved to the defensive. Something had changed.

  The man in the grey suit pulled out a notebook, saying, “Take this number down. It should help.”

  Mel looked at the notepad, for a long time.

  Then he nodded and said, “Looks like I had better be going.”

  “Yeah, sure,” the man in the grey suit replied. “You do that. But stay out of this. It’s none of your business.”

  “One more thing, though,” Mel said. “Cease and desist all surveillance related to the Abaid family, or the consequences will be dire, and they will be immediate. This comes from my superiors, I have no choice but to relay the message.”

  “Done,” the guy replied. “Do we have a deal?”

  Mel nodded, and walked away, leaving me wondering what the hell the man in the grey suit had written on the notepad.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Move fast,” Mel said into my earpiece, his voice carrying an urgency I knew all too well from our days in the SEALs. “Get the hell out of there, Tom. We’ve got no time.”

  I packed the equipment away, moving briskly, when his voice came through.

  “I’m almost done-”

  “Leave it!”

  “Okay,” I replied. “Understood. I’m on my way.”

  I’d been wearing gloves, and had wiped everything clean, so I got up at once and left everything where it lay, and made my way rapidly down to the buildings’ entrance, where Mel waited for me in his car.

  “What the hell is going on?” I asked, getting in and slamming the door behind me. “We had the upper hand, Mel. What the hell changed?”

  “We don’t have shit, Tom,” Mel shot back, hitting the ignition and pulling away from the curb without a thought for passing traffic. “Not a damn thing. The guy doesn’t know where Don is.”

  “So… what?” I demanded. “You’re just going to take his word for it?”

  “Yes,” Mel replied, his voice quiet and somehow scarier than if he’d been yelling.

  “We take his word for it. And anyway…”

  “What?” I asked, losing my cool a bit. “Anyway what?”

  “We have a more urgent priority to take care of.”

  “Is this about the notebook he showed you?”

  Mel nodded, accelerating.

  The surrounding buildings became a blur as the turbo kicked in, pushing me back against my seat.

  Mel had intensive training in ‘offensive driving’ during his time with the SEALs, which he put to good use now.

  We swerved in and out of traffic, and narrowly avoided a few sudden endings, flying through the city like a bat out of hell, cars skidding around us, others pulling onto the sidewalk to get the hell out of our way. This was kind of fun, in a vaguely terrifying, end of days sort of way.

  “Mel,” I said, trying to keep from passing out from the G-forces. “What the hell is wrong? You want to let me in on this, huh?”

  “He has Intel on me.”

  “What Intel? What number did he show you?”

  “My own home number.”

  “What?”

  “Along with my name, home address, company information, other phone numbers, everything,” Mel replied.

  “What?” I snapped.

  “All written neatly in that little book of his.”

  “Oh shit.” Grave news indeed. We were well and truly screwed.

  “He must have hacked my phone when we made the call to meet,” Mel continued. “Because he sure as shit didn’t sit there scribbling when we were having our little chat.”

  “But you spoke for under a minute,” I snapped. “How the hell could he do that? And your encryption-”

  “Is useless, as it turns out,” Mel finished. “It must have been broken in seconds. Yes, this is bad.”

  “He knows everything about you,” I said, thinking of all the possible ramifications of this. “Damn!”

  Mel grimaced, “Yes. Tom, now we need to disappear.”

  “Christ, Mel, we have to get Shelley the hell out of your apartment,” I said, urgency giving my voice a shrill edge. “This guy could be on his way there now, or his sidekicks.”

  “I tried to call ahead,” Mel replied. “But I’d already told her not to answer any calls to my home line, under any circumstances, not even from the concierge desk.”

  “Then I’ll text her!”

  “Don’t bother,” he replied, shaking his head. “You’ll be wasting your time, Tom.”

  “Why shouldn’t I at least try to make contact?”

  “Because I turned my phone off right after we’d made the call,” he said, a weariness now creeping into his voice. “And you have yours with you. So there’s no way we can contact her.”

  “Shit,” I muttered.

  “Besides,” Mel said.

  I looked at him. “Besides?”

  “Listen Tom,” Mel said, swerving to avoid a bus as we shot through a red light. “I told you he had my details in hard copy, written in pen in a notebook right under my nose.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So it’s reasonable to assume he had my information before he left his office…”

  “Shit!”

  “Yes,” he replied. “That sums it up.”

  It meant the man in the grey suit could have dispatched a team to Mel’s home before he’d even left for the meeting with Mel. Shelley could already be…

  “Don’t even think it,” Mel barked, and just then we pulled up to the curb by Mel’s place and skidded to a stop.

  “But-”

  “They’ll have to be very good indeed to get in there, Tom,” Mel said as we ran into the lobby, making a beeline for the single elevator that would take us to the penthouse, Mel punching in his password and both of us diving in together.

  “I hope you’re right,” I replied, as the elevator began its ascent.

  “Even if they have my password to get into the elevator, which is impossible because it isn’t digitally stored-”

  “They could hack it,” I muttered, watching the numbers climb.

  “With all those people in the lobby? And the concierge not even ten feet away?”

  Mel replied. “I doubt it. And like I said, even if they got to my front door, they’d be stuck there. It’s biometric, no getting around that. She’s fine Tom. My place is a fortress.”

  We stood in silence for what felt like an eternity, until the door finally opened and Mel and I exited, guns held out in front of us in case we had guests. Mel swung left as I swung right.

  The entrance lobby to Mel’s apartment stood empty.

  But his front door stood wide open.

  We exchanged a look, and our SEAL instincts and training kicked in. We approached his door, each taking a different side, and then I nodded and Mel swung in, gun swinging to the left of the room as I came in and swung to the right, taking in the whole lounge area in at a glance. The place looked exactly as it had when we left, not a thing out of place. No signs of a struggle.

  We could detect no one, so we moved slowly through the lounge, going from door to door as quietly as possible, checking room by room for any hidden enemies that might be waiting for their chance to eliminate us.

  The place was empty.

  No bad guys with guns.

  And no Shelley.

  “What the hell?” I barked, when we’d holstered our weapons and were standing together in the lounge, looking around us as if lost. “What the hell do we do now? Where the hell is Shelley?”

  “I don’t know, Tom,” Mel said. “But we need to get out of here. This place is probably bugged now.” He walked across to his laptop, ripped it open and removed the hard drive, pocketing it.

  “They probably already have this machine tagged, but I’ll be damned if it’s going to stay compromised. They’ll probably have a trace on everything coming and going
on that thing.”

  “But Shelley-” I started to say, softly, trying to put it all into place in my head. First Rachel, now Shelley. I could feel myself starting to unravel a bit, a sense of despair rising in the pit of my stomach. No time to worry, only to get things done. Even if we had no idea what, or how to get them done.

  Not for me to reason why but for me to do and die…

  Mel and I were in the dark now. And he knew it as well as I did, I could see it in the way he looked down at his hands, as if feeling helpless. I understood the feeling.

  Then my eye caught sight of a sheet of paper taped to the window behind the sofa, a place we’d somehow missed in our haste to clear the place of any danger, a mistake that could have gotten us both killed.

  We moved quickly across the room. Mel got there first, looking at the message without touching it, not wanting to risk compromising the evidence, although we both realized exactly where it had come from.

  CONSIDER THIS A WARNING

  “The guy in the grey suit,” I said. “The son of a bitch has crossed the line.”

  “Yes,” Mel replied. “He must have printed this out at his office, deployed the guys straight here before the meeting. This guy is something else.”

  I looked out of the window at the city, my thoughts on Shelley rather than the man in the grey suit. I couldn’t see the point in taking her captive. He wanted her husband. But he had eyes and ears on her for a long time now, through multiple surveillance systems and there was nothing she knew that he didn’t know as well. So why the hell did he take her?

  I thought of another possibility.

  “Jesus!”

  “What?” I said, my musing cut off abruptly, my thoughts turning to the present in a heartbeat. I turned away from the window to see what the exclamation had been about, gun at the ready.

  Mel was looking down at the floor behind the sofa, his face ashen.

  I felt the rising panic. My chest tightened. I feared for the worst.

  I reached Mel and followed his gaze.

  Shelley.

  She lay comatose on the ground, blood pooling around her head, soaking into the carpet, drying even as we looked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Back in his office, the man in the grey suit sat at his desk, hands clasped together, knuckles turning white, looking out at the sunny day. Beauty and calmness out there, but his thoughts were the exact opposite, dark and filled with the portent of bad times ahead. The plan had been to scare the guy off.

  Nothing more. Just a simple scare tactic. He’d issued the orders to his men at Division9 in the clearest and simplest way he possibly could: Go to his place, bug it to hell and back, make it clear to Mel Clarke that he was not safe, no matter how much he believed otherwise, and leave a note to clarify his wishes in no uncertain terms. Let sleeping dogs lie.

  He would have preferred to just have the guy killed outright, of course. His demise would have made things a lot easier. The man in the grey suit appreciated simplicity. But the guy he’d met in the park possessed a public profile as it turned out. He would make for a very high profile target, thanks to his technology firm, something which had helped him reach almost movie star status.

  And certainly the death of a media darling (something he despised) and hero to the people (something that sickened him even more) would attract a great deal of unwanted attention, which would pull the authorities in and keep them there until the public had what they wanted. The killer’s head on a pole.

  And on top of it the guy had fail-safes in place. Perhaps he could arrange for a little accident. Or simply stage a mugging on some dark night a few days hence, arrange for the guy to be clubbed over the head, or perhaps a knife to the throat, quick and effective.

  No chance of that happening now. The information the guy had on the man in the grey suit would go viral before his head had even hit the ground. And by extension his associates were safe too, because if anything happened to them, the end results for the man in the grey suit were the same. Screwed.

  No, the guy’s got to live. Regardless of how the man in the grey suit felt about it, he’s got to live.

  He continued looking out over the city, not seeing anything except for the images which filled his head. He sighed a deep, heartfelt sigh, filled with sadness and remorse. It saddened him when people had to be removed from this world. People who, despite their shortcomings, got to live because of their favorable circumstances. And remorse filled him because the opportunity to make the world a better place by ridding the world of undesirable people did not always present itself.

  Not this time, and not with this man.

  Ah well, nothing could be done about that now. He’d have to settle for a severe warning, which led his thoughts back to the operation he’d orchestrated at the man’s home.

  His men hadn’t expected the Abaid woman to be there.

  Hell, neither had he. He hadn’t seen a connection between the guy and the Abaid woman at all until he got the news. She’d been in the guy’s apartment when the man in the grey suit’s team had hacked the door.

  The place was supposed to be empty. The guy lived alone.

  So they’d entered and been confronted with a woman holding a long iron poker to their chests.

  A real standoff as they had no orders to kill. The guy in charge had tried to call the man in the grey suit, but he had switched it off, due to the meeting in the park.

  So the goon had given the go-ahead.

  They hadn’t used a lethal weapon as they didn’t want the man in the grey suit to come down on them like a fire storm. But they had used the next best thing, and the end result had been the same.

  So they’d taken care of it. Dumb goons.

  The man in the grey suit shook his head. It was like sending out gorillas to repair an aquatic internet cable, submersed deep beneath the icy depths of the Atlantic. And then sent them with goggles and a screwdriver to do the job. Still, he mused, you used the tools at your disposal. Whether you liked it or not. It kept you ahead of the game.

  He smiled when he realized he had just referred to himself as a gorilla in the little scenario he’d pictured. It pleased him he hadn’t said it in conversation.

  The man in the grey suit could make fun of himself, on occasion, if the right frame of mind prevailed, but nobody else would enjoy the luxury.

  Nobody who wanted to keep breathing.

  Bad things happened to those who sought comic relief at his expense. Terrible things. He remembered a dinner, a double date in fact, he had once with his girlfriend at the time.

  ***

  They’d both been in their early twenties, although the man in the grey suit felt much older, enjoying a meal out at a restaurant of her choosing. It had been a nice place, not exactly ‘silver service’ in any sense, but decent enough in a homely way, and the other couple were certainly entertaining, if a bit on the slow side. But that hadn’t surprised the man in the grey suit at all; one paid the price for genius. Everyone he met seemed a bit unevolved to him.

  He had opted for a pair of denims and a smart black sweater, both of which were brand new, bought the same day in an effort to look like other people his age, as opposed to the suits he normally wore. They were not uncomfortable, but the man in the grey suit was not used to wearing such clothing, so he felt a bit out of place. Still, the wine helped, and soon after they’d sat down together and opened the bottle, they were chatting away happily. Not about anything particularly interesting, but he found it enjoyable enough.

  At some point the other couple had asked him about his job, and he’d responded with the usual “It’s classified” response.

  Truthfully, he didn’t discuss his work outside of the office. Langley frowned on such behavior. The girl had laughed out loud, and the guy had grinned at him in a way he didn’t appreciate. So he’d casually leaned over and gripped the girl’s hair, slamming her face into the table with great force, pulled it up again and looked into her eyes (dazed, a look of mild bovine
incomprehension) and then slammed it down into the table top even harder than the first time. The crunch of her nose breaking satisfied him at the core. After that she lay still, obviously unconscious. The boyfriend took a while to realize what had just unfolded, as stupid people generally did, but the sight of his girlfriend’s blood pooling on the table had been more than enough to pull him out of his stunned state and galvanize him into action.

  He got up, screaming and yelling, moved around the table with intent toward the man in the grey suit, who remained seated. He felt strangely calm through all of this.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” his own girlfriend said in a hushed, shocked voice, getting out of her own chair and standing well away from him.

  “Shut up,” he replied sharply, not in the mood to pacify the bitch. He noticed people turning to watch the scene, not yet fully aware of what had happened, but sensing the danger, nevertheless. The sound of conversations quickly drained away.

  Let them watch, he thought. Enjoy the show, you mindless buffoons. The boyfriend stood by his side now, still swearing and ranting. He grabbed the man in the grey suit by the black sweater he had so carefully picked out earlier in the day and lifted him out of his chair.

  “You fucking lunatic!” he screamed at the man in the grey suit. A stunned look appeared on the boyfriend’s face, followed by a grimace.

  The man in the grey suit dropped neatly back into his chair as the boyfriend fell to the ground, writhing and still yelling, not in anger, but in agony now.

  The man in the grey suit put the bloodied steak knife in his belt, got up, and strode toward the entrance of the restaurant as if nothing had happened.

  None of the staff had much time to react, except for a manager who approached the man in the grey suit as he made his way to the entrance.

  “You!” he said, a note of hysteria in his voice. “Stay where you are!”

  He was a big hulking gorilla of a man, more bouncer than manager by the looks of him. He clearly worked out. The man in the grey suit hated fitness freaks. They were all superficial, and dull in the absolute fullest sense of the word. Without warning he pounced on the guy, the manager landing on the floor on his back. The steak knife flashed out and dug into the man’s chest in a second, again and again until the fitness freak stopped resisting and lay still.